A siren song is this Cairo freedom fire, the Tunisian spark now a roaring flame.

A new Mecca in Tahrir Square.

I close my eyes and wander to the city of my birth, and I'm just eight years old in the helio-polis my Armenian family called home, playing in the Cairo sands, my father's 1940s Studebaker winding up the road to the Pyramids. And I'm now back in this moment, wondering, what exactly is this social media liberation hour we're in? The words come like this:

regime jam, the people's tram
stronger than the aswan dam
pyramid scheme a nation's dream a peoples' stream
of consciousness

"Whose economy? Our economy! Who decides? We decide!" This rally cry was just one of the dozens heard when 10,000 demonstrators took to the streets of Hamilton on Saturday, showing solidarity with 900 locked-out members of the United Steelworkers Local 1005. The workers were locked out on Nov. 7 for refusing to agree to pension cutbacks that would affect 9,000 pensioners.

Busloads of labour activists came from cities as far away as Montreal and Sudbury, some departing as early as 4:00 a.m., to join the fight against United States Steel, as well as Stephen Harper's government for failing to protect workers from what many called corporate greed.

On Wednesday, Haitians turned the world upside down. What do things look like from that perspective?

Since last Sunday, the tension has been building as the population waited for the Electoral Council (CEP) to announce the results of the selections. The moment they declared Jude Celestin's good fortune to be selected for the second round, people exploded. On Wednesday, the crowds reclaimed their streets in Port-au-Prince. Sometimes it was a violent exercise, but we want to consider the imagination and creativity of the Haitian protesters.